“I’ll blow my crawfishing brains out,” he swore. “The humiliation is more than I can bear. Can’t do it myself, though. I’ll have to have it done.”
He set to work building a device in his hide-out.
“What you doing, boss?” Hunchy asked him. “I had a hunch you’d come here and start building something.”
“I’m building a machine to blow my pumpkin-picking brains out,” Albert shouted. “I’m too yellow to do it myself.”
“Boss, I got a hunch there’s something better to do. Let’s have some fun.”
“Don’t believe I know how to,” Albert said thoughtfully. “I built a fun machine once to do it for me. He had a real revel till he flew apart, but he never seemed to do anything for me.”
“This fun will be for you and me, boss. Consider the world spread out. What is it?”
“It’s a world too fine for me to live in any longer,” Albert said. “Everything and all the people are perfect, and all alike. They’re at the top of the heap. They’ve won it all and arranged it all neatly. There’s no place for a clutter-up like me in the world. So I get out.”
“Boss, I’ve got a hunch that you’re seeing it wrong. You’ve got better eyes than that. Look again, real canny, at it. Now what do you see?”
“Hunchy, Hunchy, is that possible? Is that really what it is? I wonder why I never noticed it before. That’s the way of it, though, now that I look closer.
“Six billion patsies waiting to be took! Six billion patsies without a defense of any kind! A couple of guys out for some fun, man, they could mow them down like fields of Albert-Improved Concho Wheat!”
“Boss, I’ve got a hunch that this is what I was made for. The world sure had been getting stuffy. Let’s tie into it and eat off the top layer. Man, we can cut a swath.”
“We’ll inaugurate a new era!” Albert gloated. “We’ll call it the Turning of the Worm. We’ll have fun, Hunchy. We’ll gobble them up like goobers. How come I never saw it like that before? Six billion patsies!”
THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY began on this rather odd note.
ROBERT SILVERBERG
Passengers
Robert Silverberg won the Hugo Award for Most Promising New Author in 1956, less than two years after his first professional sale. After an apprenticeship that lasted nearly ten years and yielded millions of words, Silverberg emerged in the 1960s as one of the most articulate and conscientious writers of the time. Works from this period of his career are memorable for their psychologically complex character studies, morally trenchant themes, and vivid depictions of oppressive and limiting environments that the individual must try to transcend. “To See the Invisible Man,” “Hawksbill Station,” and Thorns are futuristic studies of the individual alienated through a variety of means: social ostracism, penal exile, and exploitative victimization. Silverberg’s crowning achievement in this vein is Dying Inside, the poignant tale of a telepath alienated by his uniqueness who is further isolated by the loss of his powers and thus his only means of relating to normal humanity. Both Nightwings and Downward to Earth present contact with alien species as potentially rejuvenating experiences, with overtones of resurrection and redemption. The World Inside chronicles the dehumanizing potential of overpopulation on a society where privacy and intimacy are virtually impossible. The dramatic core of Silverberg’s strongest stories involves individuals confronted with mortality. “Born with the Dead” details the difficulties of life in a world that is shared by mortals and the revived dead. The Second Trip centers around the idea of the death of identity, in which a man discovers that he is a former criminal punished with obliteration of his true personality, a spark of which is reignited and threatens to overwhelm his new persona. The quest for immortality is a sounding board for ruminations on mortality in The Book of Skulls, about the pursuit of an occult sect that has supposedly found the secret of eternal life. Since the late 1970s Silverberg has concentrated on the development of his Majipoor saga, an epic science fantasy series that includes the novels Lord Valentine’s Castle, The Majipoor Chronicles, and Valentine Pontifex. He has also written two fantasy novels, Gilgamesh the King and To the Land of the Living, based on Sumerian mythology. His many short-fiction collections include Next Stop the Stars, To Worlds Beyond, Dimension Thirteen, Born with the Dead, and The Secret Sharer. He has written many novels and works of nonfiction for children and edited more than seventy anthologies. Silverberg won the first of five Nebula Awards for his story “Passengers,” and he is also a multiple winner of the Hugo Award.
THERE ARE ONLY fragments of me left now. Chunks of memory have broken free and drifted away like calved glaciers. It is always like that when a Passenger leaves us. We can never be sure of all the things our borrowed bodies did. We have only the lingering traces, the imprints.
Like sand clinging to an ocean-tossed bottle. Like the throbbings of amputated legs.
I rise. I collect myself. My hair is rumpled; I comb it. My face is creased from too little sleep. There is sourness in my mouth. Has my Passenger been eating dung with my mouth? They do that. They do anything.
It is morning.
A gray, uncertain morning. I stare at it awhile, and then, shuddering, I opaque the window and confront instead the gray, uncertain surface of the inner panel. My room looks untidy. Did I have a woman here? There are ashes in the trays. Searching for butts, I find several with lipstick stains. Yes, a woman was here.
I touch the bedsheets. Still warm with shared warmth. Both pillows tousled. She has gone, though, and the Passenger is gone, and I am alone.
How long did it last, this time?
I pick up the phone and ring Central. “What is the date?”
The computer’s bland feminine voice replies, “Friday, December fourth, nineteen eighty-seven.”
“The time?”
“Nine fifty-one, Eastern Standard Time.”
“The weather forecast?”
“Predicted temperature range for today thirty to thirty-eight. Current temperature, thirty-one. Wind from the north, sixteen miles an hour. Chances of precipitation slight.”
“What do you recommend for a hangover?”
“Food or medication?”
“Anything you like,” I say.
The computer mulls that one over for a while. Then it decides on both, and activates my kitchen. The spigot yields cold tomato juice. Eggs begin to fry. From the medicine slot comes a purplish liquid. The Central Computer is always so thoughtful. Do the Passengers ever ride it, I wonder? What thrills could that hold for them? Surely it must be more exciting to borrow the million minds of Central than to live a while in the faulty, short-circuited soul of a corroding human being!
December 4, Central said. Friday. So the Passenger had me for three nights.
I drink the purplish stuff and probe my memories in a gingerly way, as one might probe a festering sore.
I remember Tuesday morning. A bad time at work. None of the charts will come out right. The section manager irritable; he has been taken by Passengers three times in five weeks, and his section is in disarray as a result, and his Christmas bonus is jeopardized. Even though it is customary not to penalize a person for lapses due to Passengers, according to the system, the section manager seems to feel he will be treated unfairly. So he treats us unfairly. We have a hard time. Revise the charts, fiddle with the program, check the fundamentals ten times over. Out they come: the detailed forecasts for price variations of public utility securities, February–April 1988. That afternoon we are to meet and discuss the charts and what they tell us.